Dedoose vs Voyant Tools

Dedoose is a cloud-based application for analyzing and visualizing qualitative and mixed methods data. It handles interviews, focus groups, documents, surveys, video, images, audio, social media, and websites, and lets researchers combine qualitative and quantitative material in an analysis process. Charts, graphs, and matrices help users explore findings, with filters for examining segments. Dedoose supports real-time collaboration with other Dedoose users at no additional cost. The first 30 days of a new individual account are free; paid plans start at $12.95 a month. Student and Individual plans charge for active months, while group plans provide centralized billing. Premier and Enterprise are annual plans with SSO integration and account administration. Dedoose says communications use an AES-256 CBC-encrypted SSL/TLS tunnel, passwords are not stored, and project data remains under customer control rather than being shared with third parties. The publisher says Leviathan Security Group verified its login system. Support includes a 24/7 self-service Learning Center and assistance from trained researchers. The service identifies academic, UX, health, and policy researchers among its users.

Voyant Tools is a text-analysis environment for reading digital texts and building corpora from pasted text, URLs, existing collections, or uploaded files. It can extract text from HTML, Word, Excel, ODT, Pages, PDF, plain text, RTF, and XML. The default workspace brings together Cirrus, Reader, Trends, Summary, and Contexts, with more tools for examining terms, collocates, phrases, and related patterns. You can bookmark and share corpus URLs, and a corpus generally stays accessible when someone accesses it at least once a month. Voyant can also be embedded in another site with an iframe. The hosted service stores submitted texts for persistent access and logs tool activity, parameters, and IP addresses; it also uses Google Analytics. For offline work, VoyantServer runs locally, requires Java 11, and does not cache work on Voyant’s server. Voyant handles Unicode text in almost any language, though it has little language-specific functionality for semantic analysis. It is open source under GPL3, with the web application and documentation under a Creative Commons Attribution license. The plan is free.